Legendary investigative journalist I.F. Stone famously observed: “All governments lie, but disaster lies in wait for countries whose officials smoke the same hashish they give out.” Amongst Washington elites and the courtier press, it appears that more than a pipe or two has been passed around of late as the political and psychological ground is prepared for a military attack on Iran.

Do ‘All Options’ Mean Nukes?

During a White House press briefing Thursday, President Barack Obama said that “No options off the table means I am considering all options.”

Many of those “options” are already in play. Ranging from a covert program of assassination and industrial sabotage to planting computer malware as “beacons” for future attacks on civilian and defense infrastructure, the United States, NATO and Israel are already engaged in a campaign of violent destabilization inside the Islamic Republic.

As former CIA officer Philip Giraldi pointed out on Antiwar.com, “the White House has issued several findings to the intelligence community authorizing stepped-up covert action against both Damascus and Tehran.”

“A ‘finding,'” Giraldi noted, “is top-level approval for secret operations considered to be particularly politically sensitive. Taken together, the recent findings, combined with the evidence of major intelligence operations being run in Lebanon, amount to a secret war against Iran and its allies in the Mideast.”